


Little Pink Rabbit (Game The System)

by TrufflesTheMushroom



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Child Soldier, Ethnic slurs, Gen, Korean Characters, Korean Culture, Korean Identity, Mandatory Draft, Military Backstory, Military Draft, Perfectionism, social pressure, video game addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 00:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13260141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrufflesTheMushroom/pseuds/TrufflesTheMushroom
Summary: Song Hana is an only child, born two and a half days early and already grasping.





	Little Pink Rabbit (Game The System)

Song Hana is an only child, born two and a half days early and already grasping. Her parents are good people, if a little hands-off. Her father is a businessman at a large software company. Her mother is a manager for a popular brand shop at the Electronics Market. They live together in a tidy little apartment in Yongsan-gu, right by the Han river. Hana is a bright-eyed baby, always grabbing at things, following lights and signs, clever with her little fingers. She is sometimes prone to fits. She teethes early, and her parents dress her in a little pink rabbit onesie as a joke. She laughs and claps when the Korean gamers are on the news, winning every international championship, the games glitzy and bright and rapid-fire fast. She reaches for the pretty colors, the pretty lights.

Hana very quickly learns to do things on her own. At six, she is already self-sufficient around the house, and she relishes the praise. She takes herself to school. She buys her own snacks and gum at the corner store. She takes the subway to DMC all by herself after cram. She quickly walks through town, taking in the bustling people, the shiny buildings, the war memorials and statues of heroes battling evil robots. She takes herself to the mall. She crosses the river to see all the bright shiny games at COEX and sometimes the older kids let her have a go, the cute little kid in the fuzzy rabbit shirt, tiny sticky fingers mashing away at worn plastic buttons. She does her homework on the subway as fast as possible so she can play a little on her little handheld console. She sees her parents at dinner and they pat her on the head for being a good girl.

Hana has very good grades and her elementary school classmates adore her. She’s quick and snappy, but sometimes mouths off to teachers. She’s the center of attention. She’s competitive. Hana doesn’t have very many close friends, because she quickly sees through the ones who only want a share of her popularity or a part in the spotlight, but she tolerates hangers-on. It starts to become apparent that she doesn’t care to slow down for everyone else. She shows off and teases often. She likes winning. The kids start to resent her for acing tests she never studies for, for being unafraid to say what she means, for not caring what they think. She’s smart, and she knows it, and she proves it every day, and it bores her.

Hana has an early start with tech. Her parents provide her with a really decent computer, ostensibly for studies. Hana thinks of the loud teenagers at the internet cafe, the famous gamers on the news, the bright shiny arcade cabinets with a top scoreboard. She wants in on all of it. She dedicates her pocket money to the newest handhelds, the latest consoles, to download all the best games, the ones with the best challenges, the fastest pace. She uses games as a reward for keeping up with her studies so her parents will let her expand her collection. Any chance to lose herself in rapid-fire pixels, she’ll take. She starts gaming later and later into the night, keeping the lights off, the volume low. She starts to get good. Very good.

Hana games the system; how much study time can she afford to let slip for one more hour at the internet cafe? How drastically can she upgrade her PC at home without her parents noticing? How much sleep can she lose without looking like a raggedy street cat the next day? Is it worth a 95% in Literature, a 90%? Everything becomes a minutely managed schedule she stretches more and more each time, testing the limits. Soon, her sense of balance slips. Hana likes winning, but a streak of perfect test scores gives her nowhere to climb. Winning at school is starting to feel like a chore she has to fulfill in order to have the time to win on a screen. Every day, another Korean History chapter. Every day, a new game she can conquer. One feels more fulfilling than the other.

Hana’s schedule becomes more and more stretched, spread too thin. She acts out in class, too clever for the teachers and too sharp for everyone else. She garners even more attention, but the kind she doesn’t want. They call her a spoiled pet rabbit, a little diva. She doesn’t care. There’s no point to being in class any longer; the sense of reward has vanished completely. She doesn’t pay attention during lecture anymore, chewing gum and blowing bubbles without caring if she’s caught, tearing up her notebooks into neat strips and folding little paper stars to throw at the wastepaper basket, dreaming it’s a hitbox. Her aim becomes stellar; her grades start to suffer. Hana starts to suffer. She is prone to fits. Her hands twitch.

One day, Hana realizes that the normal life is too slow for her. The world is too slow. School will never change. The same old drudgery for years to come, eight hours of school and six hours of cram every day for another half a decade, and then a lifetime of nine to five like her parents. But games- games change. They evolve. They’re fast. Almost as fast as she is, sometimes faster- which is a thrill. Games challenge her. She starts to want something again. She wants to win. She goes back to COEX and beats all of her old scores. The wall of HANA is slowly eaten up by the name D.Va.

Hana quits cram at fourteen and starts playing hooky. Her parents only find out when she starts bringing home cash prizes from gaming competitions. They can’t stop her. People forget Song Hana, more absent than not, and start to remember D.Va, the rookie that beats pros on the regular. Sometimes people recognize her voice on the street and challenge her to a game. Sometimes crowds watch. She starts to gain fans. Rivals. Competitors and real friends. They ask for streams, and Hana sets it up with no small measure of excitement. She paints some messy bubblegum-pink streaks on her face for whiskers; she’s no ulzzang, but she can be the fastest rabbit on the net. And suddenly everyone’s watching her.

Hana choses games. She drops out of school. She draws out a logo. She dominates the scoreboards, and she gets better and better every day. She starts making TV appearances. She beats the national champs, and then the international champs. She sells T-shirts. She wins for Korea. D.Va becomes a celebrity. People love D.Va, her spark and attitude and sheer utter competence. Hana likes being D.Va. D.Va wins every time. Things are fast enough again. Things are great.

And then it attacks.

Hana is suddenly afraid. The whole country is afraid. The police are everywhere now, constantly on the lookout, always ready to fight it but never quite fast enough. The air smells wet and muddy and curdled, and people stay away from the water. It’s like a horror movie that she can’t turn off, or a picture in a book that haunts her at night. They say it’s even worse than thirty years ago, worse than the wars from long before she was born. Hana stays indoors and follows curfew, worries for her parents when they have to step out. Some of her gaming friends from the coast have gone radio silent. People greet each other online with very real relief. Hana plays fun, happy music on her stream to try and make the horror go away. The chat is what keeps her going: Thank you, D.Va. When you win, I feel okay. Please keep playing. I’m scared but at least we can watch you play. Please win for Korea.

Hana plays incessantly, proving again and again that D.Va doesn’t lose. If D.Va loses, everything will go upside-down. D.Va is playing for Korea now. She is playing for her people. D.Va logs on every single day, always on top of her game, always energetic and playful and clever. Her fans wait for her online, always sending her gifts, requesting music, recommending the latest games for her to decimate. Sometimes, bitter players accuse her of cheating. Too young, too girly, too confident, too stupid, too bratty. Slutty little chink-eyed gook that obviously hacks and streams for attention. She proves them wrong and sends them packing every game with a winky face, humiliating them soundly and without mercy as an example. Drama takes time away from gaming for real. Who has time for gossip? There are rumors going around, that important people are keeping track of gamers, that they’re being watched, that the government is secretly training an eye on the best streams; Hana doesn’t know why, and she doesn’t care. She’s the best, so let the feds watch. Let the whole world watch.

Hana receives the request in the mail, formally, and answers yes without hesitation. The Korean team jacket comes in the mail the very next day. The Championship that year is thrumming with energy, the whole crowd on edge, afraid of war, desperate for hope. Hana checks her hair in the bathroom, steeling herself. She’s going to look her best, play her best. She touches up the pink streaks on her face, now her signature look. They want D.Va, and they’re going to get her. She enters the stage to an undulating sea of lights, flashing like gunfire in her eyes, clamoring fans and reporters with too many questions. She crosses her arms and smirks, and everyone cheers.

Hana wins, because of course she does. D.Va doesn’t lose. Hana was the best gamer in Korea, and now she’s the best gamer in the world. She shakes the hands of her defeated competitors, punches all of her teammates on the arm with a wild grin, proudly holds the trophy up in the air, waves at the cameras. She knows Korea is proud of her, that even after the attacks they have something they can hold on to, a sense of pride in who they are and how they can persevere through anything. She’s riding on a cloud of adrenaline and heart-rending glory, which is why she follows her team when the government agents usher them quietly to the room in the back of the stadium, with plans and schematics and stacks and stacks of paper contracts.

Hana sits down and watches as the agents show them the statistics, the pulsing laser grid graphs and confidential info. They’ve been watching the best gamers, they say, and logging their performances. The rest of the team represents the best human potential in reflexes, hand-eye coordination skills and natural strategy, and D.Va, they say, breaks all known barriers. Hana doesn’t know why this is important until the agents smoothly bring out the schematics; prototype weaponized robots, meant be piloted by a live soldier in the battlefield, designed specifically to fight the monster in the sea. It overrides all their drones, the world’s most advanced remote-controlled weapons, they say. They say that they have been unable to train soldiers to be fast enough, move faster, think faster, fight faster. They say they need people who can be faster than the fastest robots known to humanity. They say they need help. And Hana understands.

Hana is only seventeen when she is drafted, two years away from legal adulthood and without even a high school degree under her belt. Her parents cry, insist that she’s a little girl, that this isn’t right, this is all unprecedented and illegal and cruel, but Hana persists, packing her bags and hugging them close, promising them she’ll stay safe. Hana is the youngest soldier in the division, and though many others quit the program within months, she adapts. She runs laps. She learns the lingo. She goes through drills. She makes her bed for inspection. She sends her government paychecks to her family and tells them to buy themselves warm underwear with the very first one, because no matter what, she wants to do this the Korean way.

Hana games the system; how fast can she go through the rigorous tests, how many statistics can she log before sundown, how high can she push her average APM, how can she beat the next simulation, and the next, and the next? Hana is still D.Va, and D.Va doesn’t lose. She still streams to her fans in the night, promising them that hope is in the future, and irons pink patches shaped like rabbits onto her fatigues. The military researchers and commanding officers let her get away with things like that; she suspects it’s because she reminds them of their daughters, and milks it for all it’s worth. She bends the rules, she mouths off, she ignores regulation diet. She earns leave whenever she is able, but she spends her eighteenth birthday video chatting with her parents from the barracks, her arms sore from a full day of experiments. She sleeps deeply, exhausted, feeling strangely, exhilaratingly alive, dreaming of hit points and lost lives and leveling up.

Hana’s first field test almost kills her, but she manages to roll out of the way in the nick of time, slamming all of her weight into the controls and veering sharply into a safe spot behind an outcropping of old, broken concrete. Her hair is sweaty, there’s a dripping cut on her forehead, and Hana knows that she was close. She hears the telltale sounds of whining metal, the shifting of rubble. Concentrate. Remember the training. Hana screams a wild battle cry as she boosts herself upward on her thrusters from behind the concrete, right over the rogue enemy’s head and into its blind spot. She blasts it to pieces and lands solidly on her feet, and she can’t help but laugh as she watches the remains smolder into the dirt. She whispers under her breath, “GG.”

Hana, for all her age and inexperience, is not quite a Captain but not just a Private, either. The Secretary of Defense, the Commissioner, the Sergeant General of her squadron all know that the nation needs hope more than anything, and D.Va is the nation’s hope. They defer to her when it comes to things like public relations, like media appearances and communications, like image. The MEKA team designs their own uniforms, and in a fit of inspiration, Hana paints her own robots D.Va pink. It’s the symbolism of it. She wants the crowd to know who’s out there in those machines of death. She wants them to believe in the team. She wants them to feel safe, to have hope, because D.Va’s going to fight anyone who dares try and hurt her people, and D.Va doesn’t lose.

D.Va can’t lose now.

It attacks again.

But Hana and the team are ready, and after a long and grueling battle, they manage to beat it down. They watch it slink away into the depths, almost dumbfounded, hearts soaring as they revel in the first win the nation has had in a very long time, and shakily march back to the hangars to an awaiting crowd. Hana drops out of her cockpit bruised and exhausted, but meets everyone’s eyes with a dazzling grin, flashing a peace sign and sticking her tongue out. The team watches the news coverage from the safety of their barracks, critiquing their own moves, analyzing their game for next time. Hana smiles when the anchor points out the pink MEKA at the front of the throng, charging ahead at the enemy, fearless. She showers and changes. She calls her parents. She streams a game, and assures everyone that she’s fine. They’re fine. Everyone’s okay.

Hana starts streaming the battles. The streams are just as important as the battles. War is terrifying, but when it’s a game, suddenly it’s D.Va against the biggest, baddest, most dangerous boss in gaming history, and everyone wants to watch, to cheer her on, to hold their breath and explode with excitement when the team manages another impossible win. It learns their techniques but they always adapt, taking it further every time, rising to each challenge. The specter is now tangible, now beatable. It’s just a boss now. And bosses can be taken down.

Hana collects sponsors like capsule toys. Everyone believes in D.Va. They send her toys and snacks and expensive gifts, and she takes to showing them off in her streams, letting everyone know that the Korean industry is strong. They’re survivors. They can keep going. People wear D.Va branded merchandise in every country on the planet, read the books she recommends, chew her favorite gum. The Korean military receives all the funding it needs and more. Hana shakes hands with the Prime Minister, and when someone tells him that she sends all of her paychecks to her parents, he triples her annual salary. On her nineteenth birthday, every news channel on TV wishes her a successful and fortunate year, and she celebrates her coming of age with her family and her squadron and a laundry list of celebrities that all want to be seen with her, with D.Va; role model, war hero, the best gamer in the world.

Hana takes her well-earned vacations with gusto, takes indulgent pictures with snacks at Lotte World, poses in front of Gyeongbokgoong in a pink hanbok, hikes with her family all around the remains of Jejudo to pay their respects at the graves of those lost. She travels to China and Japan and Taiwan and the Philippines. She signs autographs in every district, in every city. Once, in the quiet of autumn, she puts on a face mask and goes to Gyeongju, traveling on her own by subway like when she was an anonymous child, and stares for hours at the Emille Jong for reasons she can’t quite place. She never travels too far just in case of an emergency deployment, and always comes back home as soon as she can.

Hana doesn’t care for politics, doesn’t care about who’s army does what, who’s fighting who now, rumors about some old defunct international team trying to get together and do something or another. She doesn’t care about the fighting, the scandals, the gossip or her own aching hands, the acrid smell of blood. She doesn’t care that some still say that she’s an annoying little brat, that she doesn’t take war seriously, that she’s just a diva. She doesn’t care if people don’t understand. All she cares for is the fight, the game. All she wants is to win.

Hana sleeps with one ear pricked for the sounds of sirens, of troops running through the halls and distant splashing, screaming metal and the wind whistling across the water. She games the system; how fast can she beat the monster back into the raging sea? How many civilians, squad mates, fellow soldiers can she rescue? Can she come back with fewer bruises this time, wreck one less MEKA, save more people, spread more hope, make better jokes, brag harder, show off everything she’s got? Can she beat her last game? Can she defeat the boss this time, for real? Can she put her name at the top of the scoreboard? Can she win for Korea?

Song Hana, an only child. A clever, smart, lazy student. An internet celebrity, a cultural icon, a world champion. A young soldier, a team leader. A braggart. A hard worker. A little pink rabbit. The hope of her people.

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted from [my tumblr.](http://trufflesmushroom.tumblr.com/post/168954929193/dva) Follow me for lots of bad shitposting!!


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